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I write in Independent Australia on Monday that ‘Turnbull’s snap decision to call a Royal Commission into juvenile detention is now looking like a complete whitewash.’ I say among other things: ‘Is there a solution? Yes, I believe there is. Our mass actions can change the world. United, we can fight back. The history of the fight for civil rights in the U.S., for basic democratic rights in South Africa, for freedom from colonialism in much of the world, shows that negotiating with the oppressor will not win change. We have to defeat those who oppress us or make the costs for them too great to go on with the old ways.’

In the face of the barbarity of Australia’s detention centre gulags, the time for pussyfooting is over. If we can mobilise hundreds and then thousands in each major city to disrupt business as usual we can build a mass movement to close down these concentration camps.

My own view is that to win this fight to free the refugees will require the movement, which about 30% of Australians agree with, needs to move from passive protests to mobilisations that do change minds and actions. That means civil disobedience.

It means shutting down the centres of the major towns with thousands occupying. It means thousands turning up to stop the deportations to the concentration camps. It means unions banning anything to do with the concentration camps. It means building a radical edge to the movement to do that and to bring the thousands and then tens of thousands in to build that militant campaign of workers and protesters.

Maybe the refugee movement needs more of this civil disobedience to make Australia unworkable until the concentration camps are closed? That would involve mobilising the 25% or so of Australian society who reject the abhorrent treatment of refugees offshore and onshore.

My own view is that for the refugee movement in Australia to defend asylum seekers and to defeat the rotten, cruel, inhuman and rights abusing policies of both the Liberals and Labor we need to begin to have a discussion about civil disobedience as the next step in our campaign to free the refugees from Australia’s concentration camps here and offshore and from the hellholes in Indonesia and Malaysia.

We must turn the world upside down until the polluters and their politicians back down and begin the urgent task of moving to a renewable energy economy and creating hundreds of thousands of high wage green jobs for those displaced by the end of killer coal.

Jonathon Hari in the Independent and re-printed in today’s Canberra Times calls for mass civil disobedience to stop global warming. He finishes by saying: ‘Copenhagen had one value, and one value alone. It has shown us that if we don’t act in our own self-defence now, nobody else will.’ As anyone who has read my […]